Tellog

A simple Telegram message logger bot.

Included components

Directory	Description
server	A Django project which implements a Telegram webhook and provides a JSON endpoint for reading the saved messages.
client	A simple React javascript app that you can use to search the messages.

Installation

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:mikkokeskinen/tellog.git

Change to the directory, create a Python virtualenv and activate it.

cd tellog
pyvenv venv
. ./venv/bin/active

Install server dependencies

pip install -r server/requirements.txt

Create PostgreSQL user and database

CREATE USER tellog_server WITH PASSWORD 'changethis';
ALTER ROLE tellog_server SET client_encoding TO 'utf8';
ALTER ROLE tellog_server SET timezone TO 'UTC';

CREATE DATABASE tellog_server;
ALTER DATABASE tellog_server OWNER TO tellog_server;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE tellog_server TO tellog_server;

Also, allow the user to create new databases if you would like to run the supplied tests.

ALTER USER tellog_server CREATEDB;

Copy server/tellog/settings/local.py.sample to server/tellog/settings/local.py and edit the database settings to match the values used in the database.

cp server/tellog/settings/local.py.sample server/tellog/settings/local.py
vim server/tellog/settings/local.py

Run migrations to create the database tables

./server/manage.py migrate

Create a new bot into Telegram by messaging @BotFather. See the guide.

Enter the supplied token into the setting TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN in the file server/tellog/settings/local.py.

Telegram requires the bot webhook to be an SSL endpoint. I used ngrok to expose my development machine to the web.

ngrok http 8080

See the ngrok docs.

When you have the ngrok forwaring domain (e.g. 156eaffb.ngrok.io) use the set_webhook_url command to set the bots webhook URL in Telegram:

./server/manage.py set_webhook_url "156eaffb.ngrok.io"

Also, add the domain to the ALLOWED_HOSTS setting in the server/tellog/settings/local.py settings file.

Now you can start the development server. (The script runs manage.py runserver address 0.0.0.0:8080)

./start_dev.sh

The server should now receive and save messages from Telegram.

Tests

The few test included can be run by running:

./server/manage.py test server

Client

The client is a simple React application created using create-react-app.

The built client is included in the repository already and is viewable at the root of the Django project. (e.g. http://localhost:8080/)

The client development can be started by first installing the javascript dependencies.

cd client
yarn install

And running

yarnpkg start

The command will compile the app, start the development server and open a browser at http://localhost:3000/.

The production build can be built by running

yarnpkg run build

Search endpoint

The message search endpoint is a simple Django view which returns the messages as a list. For example making a GET request to http://localhost:8080/transcript/message/search could return:

{
    "success": true,
    "messages": [
        {
            message_id: 15,
            id: 2,
            date: "2017-03-01T18:14:41Z",
            text: "Testi",
            edit_date: null,
            obsolete: false,
            chat_name: "@kesoil",
            update_id: 178961178,
            chat_id: 338211185,
            chat_type: "private",
            from_username: "kesoil"
        }
    ]
}

The message list can be filtered with three GET parameters:

Parameter	Description
q	Includes only messages where text field contains that match the supplied value. (Using the Django Full-text search functionality.
username	Includes only messages where the from_username field is the same as the supplied value.
date	Includes only messages that are sent on the date supplied. (Format is yyyy-mm-dd) Time of day is ignored in the query.

If the search parameters are invalid (e.g. the date is not a real date) the endpoint will return JSON object where success is false and the errors-key contains a list of error messages. e.g.:

{
    "success": false,
    "errors": ["Enter a valid date."]
}